The Long Cold Reign

The Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision to eliminate checks on union and corporate campaign influence has undone over one hundred years of safeguards that had previously been in place. Protections that had already been proven vulnerable to lobbyists of various special interests were given their official last rites. Even the meager protections offered by the comically lauded McCain-Feingold Act were not spared.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which served to maintain a regulatory scheme in an effort to prevent a repeat of this nations first major economic collapse can probably be said to have been almost entirely undone during the Clinton Presidency (though the act had already suffered numerous assaults under the watch of President Reagan +1, aka, Alan Greenspan). The reasons and results of such action can be argued, however, it remains a troubling wound to another forward thinking leader guided by his intellect and desire to serve the greater good.

President Obama now faces not only the open sore of the repeal of Steagall, but an infection entirley more dangerous and far-reaching. The Supreme Court has just acted to destroy the legacy of our nations first Black President, far worse still, this court has almost certainly cast us down a perilous path that threatens any lingering remnants of this countrys democratic process.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the millenium's Dred Scott and Scalia our Justice Taney. Youre welcome America.

THE ROAD

"After the Allied victory of 1918 at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies in the space of just seventeen months. They created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East, I have spent my entire career in Belfast, Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad, watching the people within those borders burn."

The Great War For Civilisation, The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk

NEW JACK CITY-CENTER

I think it was the great Nino Brown who said, "money talks, an bullshit runs tha marathon." The new City Center hotel/condo and casino complex in the heart of Las Vegas represents more than just the mass of sleek or flashy descriptive words used to define it. Yes, it is sleek and flashy, but, it is more - much more. Amid the economic chaos that is our shared experience of this second millennium, City Center proves that with the proper mix of money and optimism all things are possible.

City Center represents the future of Las Vegas. A future that has grown from rustic saloon rustling to underworld ingenuity, corporate efficiency to modern metropolis. And for all of Las Vegas' critics, that is essentially the genesis of all great cities. What is most impressive about Las Vegas is how quickly it was, and is able to accomplish such feats.

Major projects seem to come to fruition overnight. Roads and highways are simply expanded as deemed necessary with relative ease. Surely we have all experienced some inconvenience due to various construction projects, but I ask you to temper whatever agitation you may have suffered with the thought of the cities you came from. Think about how long minor road patches and apartment development takes in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. There is no comparison. Las Vegas IS the future of metropolitan growth, the model, the paragon. We have only two problems- EDUCATION, and WATER.

Las Vegas can catapult it's already solidified status as premier entertainment situs if it uses it's famed dynamism to support a viable endgame. If the same pledge of money, credit and life were devoted to these two issues then the fate of Las Vegas' peasant population would be precarious no more.